“Americans have taken to using full stop not to literally mean a period, but to emphasize that they are referring to a complete sentence, or by extension, a complete idea or phenomenon,” Ben Yagoda, an author and University of Delaware professor of journalism and English, observed on his “Not One-Off Britishisms” blog.
They're just different ways of saying the same thing. Full stop for the punctuation mark may be slightly older than period, but both date from the late 16th century. Period derives from the Latin periodus, meaning a complete sentence.
(US period) used at the end of a sentence, usually when you are angry, to say you will not continue to discuss a subject: Look, I'm not lending you my car, full stop! SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases.
The period (known as a full stop in British English) is probably the simplest of the punctuation marks to use. You use it like a knife to cut the sentences to the required length.
We have Aristophanes of Byzantium to thank for full stops; Aristophanes created a system of punctuation in the 3rd century BCE that forms the basis for the modern comma, colon, and period. At the time, however, the system was more about helping a speaker read a text aloud than grammatical rules.
In the years before the Second World War, it was a not-uncommon affectation for people of a certain class to add “what?” to the end of a sentence, when inviting agreement. Things like, “I say, pretty decent sort of day, what?” or “Beastly weather, what?” were commonly heard remarks.
Abbreviations. British English typically does not put a period after an abbreviation. Dr, Mr, Mrs, Ms, and vs are all written without periods after them.
In conversation
In British English, the words "full stop" at the end of an utterance strengthen it; they indicate that it admits of no discussion: "I'm not going with you, full stop." In American English the word "period" serves this function.
Shark Week. Aunt Flo. Period. All of these words are euphemisms for one thing: menstruation.
Contents. Bloody, as an adjective or adverb, is a commonly used expletive attributive in British English, Australian English, Irish English, Indian English and a number of other Commonwealth nations. It has been used as an intensive since at least the 1670s.
A study by Binghamton University (2015) seemed to back this up. They found that text messages ending with a full stop are seen as less sincere than the same message without a full stop.
The full stop (.), also called the period, presents few problems. It is chiefly used to mark the end of a sentence expressing a statement, as in the following examples: Terry Pratchett's latest book is not yet out in paperback.
period; point; stop; full point; punctuation; punctuation mark.
United Kingdom: “Riding the crimson wave.” United States of America: “Aunt Flo is visiting.”
Menopause is the time that marks the end of your menstrual cycles. It's diagnosed after you've gone 12 months without a menstrual period. Menopause can happen in your 40s or 50s, but the average age is 51 in the United States. Menopause is a natural biological process.
Although men will not bleed, nor will they experience all of the same symptoms as women, these hormonal shifts can have some pretty notable side effects, especially with mood and irritability. Some call it the “man period” others call it Irritable Male Syndrome, either way, it can be quite similar to a woman's PMS.
We've heard them called plugs, flow stogies and menses mops.
What Did People Do before Pads and Tampons? The short answer is that most people with periods used cloth rags as a kind of DIY sanitary pad. Linen was a particularly good material for that purpose. But there's also evidence that some people used a particularly absorbent type of bog moss.
The word period itself comes from the Latin word “periodos”. The punctuation mark shifted in symbol and even meaning from the time of Aristophanes to the 16th-century grammarians. By the nineteenth century, both American and British English were consistent in their usage of the terms “full stop and period.”
Periods get a lot more use in German than in English, where the mark is typically just used to end sentences. As you can see in the example below, this little dot indicates ordinal numbers, tells time and substitutes the comma in numbers past the hundreds.
As it turns out, Thai is written in what's called a 'scriptio continua,' which means there's no punctuation or spacing between most words. Yep, that's right! No question mark, no comma, or period. Not even exclamation marks or quotation marks.
The difference here is that Australian English does not place a full stop after a title when it ends with the same letter as the full version (e.g. 'Mr', 'Mrs' or 'Dr'), whereas American English does: Australian English: Mr and Mrs Douglas walked home. American English: Mr. and Mrs.
Miss is a common title for unmarried women up to roughly the age of 30. Ms. is generally used for unmarried women past the age of 30. It's also a safe option for women of any age whom you are unsure how to address. Ms. can also be used (instead of Mrs.) for a married woman.
Only Dr. is correct as it is an abbreviation. You should always use the full stop. In the UK, the use of the full stop appears to be ok to use either Dr or Dr. However, in America the de facto is to always use the period / full stop — it's Dr.